After nearly three years in development, last Wednesday Mozilla announced that Firefox 3 was ready for release. During Firefox 3's development, memory-usage improvement has been a consistent theme.

Firefox's third release candidate was released on Wednesday last week, and contained a fix for loading issues with Mac OS X. The final release is identical to RC3, said the organization.

Mozilla is hoping to set a Guinness World Record for the most number of downloads of an application in a day, on the release of the browser.

There is currently no official Guinness World Record for the total number of downloads of an application in a day. During the first 24 hours of Firefox 3's release, Mozilla is aiming for over 1.6 million downloads and hoping for five million.

Mozilla has encouraged its community of over 175 million users to sign up on the spreadfirefox.com marketing site to receive Firefox 3 on Tuesday, to host download parties, and to put Firefox badges on websites and blogs. According to Mozilla, over 60,000 people in the UK have pledged to download Firefox 3 on its release date.